There are many great contemporary composers of our time but few write music that we can relate to so easily and closely as Nikolai Kapustin. His exquisite use of techniques and musical languages of classical and jazz ensures that his music appeals to a wide range of listeners. To those who love classical music but know little about jazz it does not sound too unfamiliar and vice versa. Indeed, it gives great pleasure to even the most untrained ears of either genre of music.
In recent years, the jazz-like, classical and modern music by the Ukrainian composer Nikolai Kapustin (*1937) has become an inside tip on classical concert stages. During a visit to Nikolai Kasputin in Moscow ten years ago, the composer entrusted the cellist Eckart Runge with the notes for his Cello Concerto No. 1 op. 85, which, unlike the second one, had neither been performed nor recorded. The work vibrant with energy combines in unparalleled manner colorful symphonic music with the groovy sound of the big band tradition and the virtuosity of a Charlie Parker with the chamber music intimacy of a Miles Davis into a new and fulminant musical diction.
The Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020), who died at the beginning of the pandemic-related cultural hiatus which has been unique with regard to world history, was able to experience considerable appreciation in his last two decades, which recently gained more and more momentum. Coming from the best Soviet aristocracy of piano teaching - Kapustin was a pupil of a pupil of Horowitz's teacher Blumenfeld and then studied with the great Alexander Goldenweiser until 1961 - he was denied great recognition in the Soviet Union. As with many great piano composers since Chopin, the cycle of concert etudes from the middle of his life is particularly suitable for an introduction to this world of works. Kapustin's typical reference to jazz, which probably kept him from greater success in the Soviet years, is based on the highly individual, deliberate adaptation of stylistic elements. He got to know jazz greats such as Ellington, Basie, Cole, Garner, Peterson and others through records and the radio and picked out what suited him. The extremely sensitive, not monotonously hammering as is so often the case, approach of the Chinese pianist A Bu, who is also trained in jazz, is pleasing with regard to interpretation, and he demonstrates his affinity for Kapustin's music through two samples of his own work.
When western audiences discovered the music of Nikolai Kapustin, they were truly shocked: Who was this Soviet (!) composer, whose music sounded more like an Oscar Peterson improvisation than anything else – but who wrote detailed scores, black with notes? As we discover more and more of his music (and there’s so much more yet to discover), a very distinct, always wholly charming voice emerges, whether in a freewheeling outright-jazzy work like his Concerto for 2 Pianos and Percussion, the more symphonic Fifth Piano Concerto, or the frisky Sinfonietta which transports us into a smoky 1940s bar in Manhattan.
Pianist Luisa Imorde loves innovative combinations: following on from circus dances by Schumann and Widmann and the affair of honour between Woelfl and Beethoven, she now prepares to cast light on Johann Sebastian Bach and Nikolai Kapustin. This is an album whose spectrum ranges from Baroque counterpoint through to polyrhythmic jazz sounds.